OT: Do Search Terms Describe the Visitor?

12012012

January 12, 2012

I thought that I would start this slightly off topic blog article with a bit of humor. Seven months ago I wrote a blog article that refuses to move from the first position in the most visited articles on this blog. In the process of trying to understand why a mathematics focused article is the most popular article on an Oracle Database specific blog, I regularly review the search keywords that bring people to my blog. Yesterday alone, the search keywords that apparently pointed to the popular blog article included (not a complete list):

finding distance between two points lat long (2)

distance spherical points coordinates oracle (2)

find distance between two longitude latitude points (1)

calculate distance between points in a feature (1)

calculate speed longitude latitude (1)

distance between two lattitude points (1)

how to get distance between two latitudes in meter (1)

access table that converts latitude and longitude (1)

calculate time and distance between two longitudes (1)

distance between two points latitude and longitude transact sql (1)

converting to oracle degree minutes (1)

distance between latitude (1)

select sdo_geom.sdo_distance (1)

oracle sdo_geom.dos_distance (1)

calculate distance longitude latitude (1)

method of measuring distance using plain (1)

oracle spatial calculate distance (1)

how to calculate distance between two latitude and longitude (1)

to calculate distance between two points (1)

oracle spatial sort lat lon coordinates (1)

longitude and latitude distance between 2 points (1)

solve this:find distance between (35 degrees 21′) and (29 degrees 57′) and given that the radius is 3960 (1)

distance between two points wordpress (1)

how to get distance between two longitudes (1)

calculate distance between two lat long points (1)

how to find distance between points of longitude (1)

sql function calculate distance gps kilometers (1)

calculate distance between lattitute longitude (1)

excel calculate distance from lat long (1)

calculate distance from lat long sql (1)

I think that the above keywords point to one and only one conclusion: the majority of the visitors to this blog are lost, know only their latitude and longitude coordinates (and the coordinates of where they are supposed to be), and are able to VPN in to their Oracle Database at work to determine how long it will take to become unlost. :-)

While on the topic of interesting search keywords, I thought that I would mention a favorite search keyword that appeared in the WordPress statistics. My all time favorite interesting search keyword that was used to access this blog appeared shortly after I reviewed a red covered Oracle related book – the search keywords were “Charles Hooper is getting sued”. Needless to say, it is interesting that the search keywords found an article on my blog.

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Moving on to the point of this blog article, I have also noticed a curious trend in some of the search keywords. WordPress makes it a bit diffcult to go back in time to tabulate somewhat popular search keywords when there are a lot of commonly used keywords that access this site. However, with a bit of effort, I attempted to locate search keywords that share a common pattern. Those search keywords that I located (with the minimum number of hits indicated) follow:

Undoubtedly, in the above cases the searcher likely found my review of a particular book. The above list has me wondering about a couple of items. I was a full time college student for five years to obtain my degree. I remember the pain of signing a check for what seemed to be (U.S.) $500 every semester – it did not seem to matter much if I was buying mathematics books (a $204 Calculus book from Amazon oddly seems approproate here) , computer books, or psychology books – the total was always about the same. Was that money for books a waste? Maybe I could have just found the book out on the Internet somewhere… they had that neat Gopher tool way back then, but not the WYSIWYG interface that is common now.

I am left wondering what the people searching for the above keywords might have been thinking. I assume that some of the searchers have spent some time in college, and might even be Oracle developers or DBAs. So, do you think that search terms describe vistors? If so, how do you think the above search keywords might describe the searchers?

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